Sustainability

The terms sustainability, green, eco, social responsibility and many others are thrown around all the time. We hear them on commercials and in the products we buy. They are in every field from engineering to education. But what does sustainability actually mean? How do you decipher between all of the different meanings and use of the term ‘sustainability’? It’s not easy.

At New Leaf, we don’t have any one preference for how to explain  sustainability – because every explanation has a purpose and are correct in their own way. Sustainability has a unique and personal meaning to everyone depending on their background, interests, and experiences – and therefore means something different to each person and every organization. Trying to get everyone to agree on the same explanation and illustration of sustainability is quite an uphill battle.

The important part with sustainability is not getting an agreed upon explanation of what it looks like or how it should be approached, rather, it’s more important to agree upon the common principles that scientifically define sustainability. Essentially, what is the foundation in which many of these explanations are built upon?

Sustainability is a lot like art…

One way to better understand sustainability is to think about art. When you ask someone what art means, you probably get a bunch of different interpretations and explanations.

One person might view art as a children’s play in a local theater. Another might think of art as the intricate and detailed drawings of a renaissance painter. And yet another might view art as a pile of trash thrown together in a unique way. Are any of these explanations of what art is wrong?

No. But what we can do, is uncover the common thread between all these interpretations and explanations to come to a shared understanding of what art is. Perhaps that shared understanding of art is:

> the use of skill and imagination…
> in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences…
> that can be shared with others.

By developing a shared definition of what art is – then people with different views of art can sit in the same room and talk with a shared language and understanding of what defines art at its most basic and principle level. The same thing needs to happen with sustainability!

NEXT » The Sustainability Challenge